


Ice Cream

by Teramina



Series: I Think We're Alone Now (Five's Tales from the Apocalypse) [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: (i love five but he's 13 and hasn't had the best upbringing his view of the world is a bit fucked), (most of these will be), Angst, Apocalypse fic, Gen, Slice of Life, Unreliable Narrator, also i dont think it's worth the major character death tag, but this is the apocalypse literally everyone is dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 13:46:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18895828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teramina/pseuds/Teramina
Summary: 8 days into the Apocalypse, Five finds Vanya's book.





	Ice Cream

**Author's Note:**

> hey look who actually has titles for fics for once
> 
> anyhow this is gonna end up somewhere in the middle of a series of one shots, but it's the only one done, and i crave that validation (and they work fine standalone anyway), so posting it now, i'll reorder the series into chronological order once i have the parts
> 
> but yeah, i have about 500 headcanons for five in the apocalypse (and just five in general), so im trying to turn as many of them into fic as possible, enjoy!

Five’s task that morning is sorting the books. He’s got a whole library on hand now (or at least, the burned partial remains of a whole library), so there’s got to be something useful in here. It’s also just helpful to take a stock of his inventory. A lot of the books are still on the shelves, yes, but even more are scattered across the floor, some with pages missing (which are equally haphazard all over the place).

The easiest place to start is splitting fiction from non fiction. Some of the shelves are in something of an order, but they’re few enough that it’s easier for Five to just dump all the books he can find into a pile and sort them from there. 

For the non fiction, he’s especially prioritizing science books, anything that might help him get out of here. For the fiction, he prioritizes anything he thinks looks interesting. For all the strenuous work surviving out here is, there’s a lot of downtime in the apocalypse. And he’d much rather spend it reading than giving in to anxiety and paranoia.

By the time he gets down to biographies, he figures there’s not much left here that’s interesting. Five has never cared how other people live their lives and he’s not about to start now. He's casually looking through surviving titles when he catches a familiar name. It takes him a few seconds to process it, enough time to drop the book in question and move onto the next, and he has to dig back into the book pile to find it again. 

What he pulls out is a tattered paperback copy of an autobiography. With his sister's face on the front. His sister as he knows her, thirteen year old Vanya Hargreeves, even though she definitely hadn't been writing this when he left, nor would their dad have ever allowed it published. He quickly flips to the copyright section, and sees it was first printed in 2014.

_...2014.  _

He knows, of course, theoretically, that he's somewhere in 2019 or later, that was the date on the newspaper, but still... the date as he knows it is November 10th, 2002. Or it was when he left. That's the where he's trying to get back to, and in his head it's sort of what the date is constantly, now. Time doesn't really exist here, now that all the people who relied upon it died. 2014, as far as he's concerned, is the future, even if it's currently the past.

They would have been, what, 24? Assuming it was in the first nine months of the year. God, that's so  _ old. _ Nearly double their current age. Or... his current age, anyway. His siblings in 2019 are 29 and, well... not aging anymore. For the same reason as everyone else in the apocalypse.

_ It's fine, _ he tells himself.  _ It's not permanent, you're going back to fix it.  _

It's hard to imagine Vanya as an adult. Hard to imagine any of them being that old, honestly. What are they like in the future? Not still running missions for the old man, he hopes. Most of them already had a plan to get out of there as soon as they were old enough. Do they have jobs? What jobs do they do? Vanya at least had her violin, but the rest of them were never really encouraged to think that way. He doesn't think teleportation and the ability to take down a grown man in seconds are good things to put on a resume. Not unless he was fighting for a living, and... no. No, Five's not spending the rest of his life doing that.

He's good at maths, he likes numbers. He doesn't know what jobs you could do with that, though. Did grown up him ever figure it out? So far he hasn't seen any evidence of anything about what happened to his older self, just like with Vanya and Ben. And honestly, he doesn't have much information about the first four, either, just what was there when he found them.

...Well, there’s only one way to find out.

He opens the book.

* * *

Five normally considers himself a fast reader. Especially with something like this, he should have torn through it in an hour or two, max. But three hours later and he's not even close to done.

He keeps finding himself getting sidetracked, going over paragraphs again and again, processing what happened to his family in the years since he left them, and going off on long mental tangents about how the others would have reacted to reading certain parts.

He doesn't think they would have been very happy with it. Vanya laid out all the family history, their issues with Dad and each other, for everyone to read. She’s spared no detail on Luther’s obstinance, Diego’s rebelliousness, Allison’s selfishness, Klaus’ ignorance, Five’s ego, though she seemed to be nicer on him and Ben. And she constantly brought up how much she was left out of things.

It’s definitely brave. Not a move he could have expected from her, the Vanya he knew was always way too concerned with gaining their approval to do anything they wouldn’t like. And they definitely wouldn’t like this.

For the most part she directed her hatred at Dad, which was fair, it wasn't always directed at them. But there was always an undertone that implicated the rest of them too, a fury against the Umbrella Academy and all who wore the symbol of it, whether they wanted to or not.

She also mentions talking through her childhood with a therapist, which Five has mixed emotions on. He’s glad she had someone to talk to, glad she was trying to get help, but he’s not sure everything they said to her was right. This therapist must have had something against the Umbrella Academy, Five concludes. Like, sure, some things were hard, and sometimes Five hated Dad as much of the rest of them, but he wasn’t a baby, he could handle it. And they were heroes, they saved people, what would happen if the Academy hadn’t existed? It wasn’t fair to just call the whole thing abusive and bad, it was  _ necessary.  _ If the therapist didn’t understand that she was an idiot. 

Still, enough of her perspective matches up with what Five remembers that he knows she’s not making anything up. The best thing Five can take away from this is that there was no winning in their childhood, really. Vanya talked to him more than the others, he knows how she felt about it all, and being Number Seven wasn’t easy on her. But at the same time, she didn’t really get what the rest of them had to deal with, either, and it’s not for her to comment on. There was some stuff she genuinely was protected from, even if she felt lonely because of it.

He’ll have to talk to her about it when he gets back. There’s better communication to be had on both sides, if this is how she feels as an adult.

Especially since the others wouldn’t be nearly as generous on her. This book is personal, full of bad stuff, and stuff deriding an Academy and hierarchy a lot of them are still pretty loyal to. Especially Numbers One through Three. It would have been a slap in the face to them, and a very public one at that. 

Well, maybe Ben would be okay with it. At the very least, he wouldn't have made a scene about it. Five is sure the others did, and he wishes he could have been there for that.

Or maybe he was there? Something to look forward to, once he gets back.

...Maybe he shouldn't be reading this book. Having too much knowledge of the future could cause all kinds of problems when he's back in the past. 

No, it'll be fine. Five'll just be careful, that's all. He knows how time travel works, he's smart enough that he won't let it affect him. That'll work, he's sure of it. And he really wants to read the rest of this. It's both enlightening and comforting. Almost like having his family with him again.

And having his family with him in spirit means he doesn’t have to think too hard about where his family is currently.

Vanya has a whole chapter dedicated to him. Five’s on his third reread of it, and, like most of this book, he still can’t figure out how he feels about it.

On one hand, it's well written, and it's nice to hear Vanya's thoughts about him, she was always so kind, thought so highly of him.

On the other, it's all just stuff he already knows. And that's the scariest part. Vanya is 24 when writing this, and she hasn't seen him since they were 13. He keeps reading back through it, hoping he missed something, any indication he gets back to his family like nothing ever happened. Honestly, he'd take just getting back to his family at this point. But there's nothing. He doesn't get back. She thinks he's dead.

She leaves peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches out for him. There's a tightness behind his eyes when he reads that, and he does his best to ignore it. He refuses to let himself cry over this. He's not dead. He's going to get back. He's going to get back and change what Vanya writes in this book. And the first thing he's going to do is eat a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich.

* * *

Five's about three quarters of the way through when he hits a line that makes him drop the book, forcing him to flip frantically through the pages, looking for where he left off and hoping to anything out there that he didn't read what he thinks he just read.

He read it right the first time.

_ "We all thought Five leaving would be the worst loss to our family we'd ever experience. At least with Five, we could believe he was still out there somewhere. But one day, just a few weeks out from our 17th birthday, the actual worst happened. Five kids left on a mission, and four came back. Ben was dead." _

Vanya doesn't explain how it happened. That doesn't seem like the kind of thing you should write in a book, Five thinks numbly. He still wishes he knew the answer.

Ben was dead.

Ben  _ died, _ and Five wasn't there to see it. 

No wonder he wasn't with the others for the apocalypse, he'd died nearly 13 years earlier. 

...Is Vanya dead too? Had that happened after she wrote this book?

No, she can’t be, she wouldn’t have been with the rest of the Academy anyway, whatever happened didn’t have anything to do with her. And it doesn't matter anyway, they're all dead now, and Five is going to fix it. 

Five is going to go back and fix it.

He can't let Ben be dead. 

God,  _ Ben. _

Of all of them, Ben deserved that the least. He'd always been so reserved, didn't get involved in anything he didn't have to, but he was a good person. His room was across from Five's, up in the attic instead of on the second floor with everyone else, and Five liked it just being the two of them. Five used to sneak books sometimes for Ben, using his powers to get out of the house without anyone noticing and buy ones they didn’t have at home. Ben, in return, was always down to listen to whatever new thing Five was interested in and wanted to talk about. It came with an eye roll, sometimes, but he’d be there, and that was the important part. Plus, they had the most shared interests of anyone in the house, so sometimes it led to genuinely interesting conversations. Of all his siblings, Ben - along with Vanya - were the ones he most enjoyed being around. 

Ben had never even wanted to go on missions. Five didn't like being used for his powers either, but at least his powers were his own, and there was something fun about taking down bad guys with it. Ben's power wasn't like that. His was a curse, powerful but horrific, and Ben had never wanted anything to do with it. 

Ben was the reason they used to be allowed to get ice cream after missions sometimes. It was his idea, and no one really wanted to argue with the kid covered in the blood of people he never wanted to kill. 

And it was fun, getting ice cream with his siblings. Their dad had eventually called off the tradition, saying they were too old for such frivolities, but for a while it gave them an hour or two where they just felt like normal kids, instead of a team of world saving superheroes.

_ Ha. So much for that, anyway. Guess you were wrong, Dad. We tried to save the world, and look what happened. _

Five wishes there was ice cream in the apocalypse. There isn't.

**Author's Note:**

> i have a [tumblr](https://atalana.tumblr.com/)


End file.
